The Little Blog of Books: Book Review: The Murder Complex by Lindsay Cummings

An action-packed, blood-soaked, futuristic debut thriller set in a world where the murder rate is higher than the birthrate. For fans of Moira Young’s Dust Lands series, La Femme Nikita, and the movie Hanna.

Meadow Woodson, a fifteen-year-old girl who has been trained by her father to fight, to kill, and to survive in any situation, lives with her family on a houseboat in Florida. The state is controlled by The Murder Complex, an organization that tracks the population with precision.

The plot starts to thicken when Meadow meets Zephyr James, who is—although he doesn’t know it—one of the MC’s programmed assassins. Is their meeting a coincidence? Destiny? Or part of a terrifying strategy? And will Zephyr keep Meadow from discovering the haunting truth about her family?

Every year there are a handful of books released that have a serious amount of hype surrounding it. This year The Murder Complex by Lindsay Cummings is one of them. This hype can be both and good and bad thing. The good is that the book is almost guaranteed to do well as everyone is interested in it. The bad is that there is a risk that the expectation can be a little too high and the book might end up disappointing. With the Murder Complex I fell into the hype and I couldn’t wait to read it but unfortunately my expectations were too high and I ended up being disappointed.

This isn’t a terrible book and I didn’t hate it but I had numerous problems with it. The premise is good, I really liked the idea but despite being extremely brutal in parts it wasn’t all that different from other books in the genre. That itself is not a problem, there are always going to be overlapping themes and ideas in popular genres (in this case dystopia). The problem was the world building and explanations of everything that was going on. Simply put I found this book really hard to follow and towards the end I had no idea what was going on at all.

That was not the only issue. All in all I thought it lacked depth and I couldn’t relate to the story or the characters at all. Things seemed to happen for no real reason and all the chances to add some real depth and emotion were wasted. This was really evident towards the end in a moment between the main character and her mother. It had the potential to be really powerful instead it was borderline silly and lacked any substance.

The characters were alright but I didn’t really care about them too much. The chapters swapped between Meadow and Zephyr’s point of view but I found their voices far too similar and there were times when I forgot whose chapter was whose. Meadow lacks personality, she is great at kicking ass but doesn’t do much else apart from fall in love with Zephyr the moment she meets him.

Zephyr’s insta-love is even worse and he manages to fall for Meadow before he even meets her. He dreams about his ‘moonlit girl’ all the time. The speed at which he manages to fall in love with her is frankly astonishing. Zephyr is probably a little more interesting but his puppy dog, love struck obsession with Meadow is just off putting. Considering all the love floating around you would expect the romance to work. It didn’t. There was no chemistry, no building of feelings it was flat and boring and I didn’t care about it at all.

Add in some pointless character deaths and an ending I didn’t really get the point of and, well to be honest it was surprising I managed to get through this. It is obvious that this book wasn’t for me. I was so excited for it and I wanted to love it but there were just too many issues that I couldn’t let go of. I am sure there are many people who will really love this but unfortunately I wasn’t one of them.